Since the end of the Soviet Union, Christian Orthodoxy has regained importance in Russian society. Considering the religious dynamics in the decades after 1990, scholars working in the field have been debating about a reliable measuring tool for religiosity. The present study provides a validation of two short forms of the Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS), the CRS-5, and CRSi-7 in Russia, as well as its corresponding translated items. Therefore, data from two large-scale sociological surveys from 2008 (N = 894) and 2019 (N = 1768) were used. A multigroup confirmatory factor analysis with restrictions on the variance and covariance structure of the model shows good results in terms of absolute, parsimony, and relative model fit for the CRS-5 and CRSi-7. Moreover, the models indicate time-invariance, which is a consistent psychometric characteristic of both short forms. The time-invariance is accompanied by the good internal consistency of the scales: The CRS-5 with α=0.85 and the CRSi-7 with α=0.84. The results of the analysis encourage the use of the CRS-5 and the CRSi-7 for research on religiosity in Russia. While the CRS-5 is especially suitable for the Orthodox-dominated religious landscape, the CRSi-7 should be used if non-monotheistic private religious practice and religious experience are the focus of the scientific investigation.
including substantial and theoretical coding, theoretical sampling, and constant comparative method. Theories used include the concept of elective affinity between the motivation of economic activities and types of economic organization (Weber) and the typology of economic systems by K. Polanyi. This study attempts to show the elective affinity between the ethics of humility and the principle of economic integration known as reciprocity networks of mutual support of both churched and unchurched Russians, centered in the parishes and functioning on the basis of the logic of gift giving. Such a coupling of motivation and informal economy, invisible to the GDP, performs important functions in contemporary Russia which has a mix of economic types (such as generating of social capital or development of moral density and solidarity in local communities. They in it's turn fulfill some economic functionsi.e. avoiding getting into the debt bondage or some others). The article deals with (the activated by humility ethics) reciprocity and its consequences for the community seeks to challenge the established view on Orthodox Christianity as an 'unproductive' culture, hindering economic development.
Weber's famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has been widely applied in sociological research. Weber formulated the question of the relationship between religion and the economy in the sense that certain types of Protestant denominations fostered the development of capitalism. One of the main factors which Weber paid attention to was the "Protestant ethic" concept of calling/vocation. The authors of this research have integrated these findings and extended the original Weberian approach in which ethics plays the central role in the analysis of the elective affinity between religion and the economy. It can be shown that humility is the second component of the ethical variable used by Weber in his sociology of religion. This approach makes the concept of economic ethics relevant for studying all major Christian denominations, that is, not only Catholic and Protestant, but also Orthodox. The aim of the current article is to develop an empirical research method based on this theoretical approach. We propose a scale measuring the ethics of calling and humility which can be assessed in quantitative surveys. The scale was pre-tested in October-November 2017 in four countries (233 respondents in Russia, Switzerland, Georgia, and Romania). After corrections based on the pre-test results, the scale was applied in a survey of parishioners of four Christian denominations in Russia (1262 respondents), those of the Orthodox, Catholic, "traditional" Protestant (Lutheran, Baptist, etc.), and the "new" Protestant (Pentecostal) denominations, in 2017-2018.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.